Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Into the El Niño sauna

by Kim Cobb

I’ve been
waiting 18 years for this moment.

You see, I study
the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (some would say I’m obsessed with it), and
this is the largest El Niño event since 1997/98, which itself was the largest
El Niño on record. During that event, I was a beginning graduate student on
a large research cruise to Christmas Island. I had no context for the
conditions I was witnessing at the time – the white corals, the huge swells on
the leeward side, the constant rain. Nobody on the cruise fully grasped the
magnitude of the event that would peak that very month.

Fast-forward 18
years, and I am leading the first of several field expeditions designed to
document the effects of this massive El Niño event on the coral reefs I’ve been
studying for my entire career. The event itself will be gone in the blink of an
eye, but its effects on coral reef ecosystems will likely last a decade or more.

At 2N, 157W,
Christmas Island lies at the epicenter of the current El Niño event. NOAA has
sounded the alarm on a global coral bleaching event that is currently underway,
and Christmas Island has been under an Alert Level 2 (indicative of “Mortality
Likely”) for the last three months (Figure 1). With ocean temperatures
projected to remain warm over the next 1-2 months before cooling into the
spring, most of the corals here will likely bleach. When corals lose their
colorful, symbiotic algae, they lose a critical source of energy and become
much more vulnerable to disease and infection. If bleaching lasts for more than
a few months, corals are unlikely to survive the episode. In 1997/98, I
witnessed widespread bleaching and mortality – although nobody was around to do
an official survey. And over the last 18 years, I’ve watched the reefs recover,
slowly but steadily.

Figure 1. Map of coral bleaching projections for the last week, from NOAA Coral Reef Watch, showing a high likelihood for bleaching at Christmas Island.

In my lab, we use geochemical variations locked in coral skeletons from Christmas Island to
reconstruct a history of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) variability over
the last centuries to millennia. Our lab’s data show that recent ENSO
variability is significantly stronger than ENSO variability over the last 7,000
years, indicating that greenhouse gases may be driving an intensification in
ENSO extremes (see related publication here). But what happens when the archive I rely on to study past El
Niño events is threatened by a very strong El Niño event? I don’t know, but
this winter, I intend to find out.

Ever since
spring 2014, I’ve been waiting for the fledgling El Niño event to take shape. In
late August of this year, after a decisive push from the atmosphere in the right
direction, the breath-holding gave way to a flurry of preparations for the
upcoming field season. Over the course of three planned expeditions, my lab’s
resources, and those of my collaborators, will be stretched to the very limit (and
beyond, in some cases).

Our mission for
the current trip is multi-fold, and incredibly ambitious.

Our top priority is to service and/or install a wide variety of environmental logging devices, including a
high-end weather station, as well as ocean temperature
and salinity loggers, some of which were installed in Summer 2014. We will collect hundreds of rainwater and seawater
samples to document how this event has changed the geochemical and isotopic
properties of the environmental waters - changes that the corals record in their skeletons and that we rely on to document past El Niño events. With this trove of data, we hope to quantify how the physical
and chemical environment changed before, during, and after the event.

Our second
objective is to document the health of the coral reefs on Christmas Island by
systematically photographing transects of corals previously photographed by our
collaborator Julia Baum and her students on previous expeditions to the island.
When her team was here in July 2015, her graduate student Danielle Claar
photographed a variety of bleached corals, estimating total bleaching at
roughly 30% (Figure 2). We expect much more extensive bleaching this time
around, as ocean temperatures have only increased since that time.

A bleaching Acropora colony in upper left, along with fully bleached Pocillopora colonies, in July 2015. Photo taken by Danielle Claar.

Thanks for your work on this important topic...having been to Christmas Island during the last El Nino... I know how this can effect the island... I was supposed to fly down in late Dec 15.. FIJII air cancelled the flight... I believe the runway was flooded...I wonder what is happening on the island now... Any insight would be appreciated

Thanks for your work on this important topic...having been to Christmas Island during the last El Nino... I know how this can effect the island... I was supposed to fly down in late Dec 15.. FIJII air cancelled the flight... I believe the runway was flooded...I wonder what is happening on the island now... Any insight would be appreciated

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Our research seeks to reduce the uncertainties of future climate change by improving our understanding of past climate variability. Here, we bring you field stories, overviews of our various projects in laymen's terms, a smattering of women in science issues, and reflections on energy/climate education and policy.